Azure Migration

Azure Migration Strategy

Migrating to the cloud can be a daunting experience for organizations of all sizes, which is why Vandis has worked closely alongside Microsoft Azure to provide the best value and services to our clients. Our extensive Cloud & DevOps practice has been built to assist our clients in migrating their workloads or broader infrastructure to the Azure platform. Having executed migrations across multiple industries, Vandis can speak to your organization about migrating in a security first manner, along with cloud governance and cost management. Vandis has a proven process to provide full lift & shift services to our clients. Our engineering team begins by establishing your company’s motivation to move data and workloads to Azure such as:

The biggest block to success in the cloud is the failure to start. For a large application estate, organizations will need to come up with a solid plan of action. We can work with your team to begin experimenting with a few projects first to prove the value of the cloud, and then determine how to best scale to fit your needs. One critical part of planning your migration is identifying the readiness of your applications to migrate to the cloud. Typically, there are five ‘buckets’ that we can assign each workload to:

Application may operate at a speed or scale that is not viable in the public cloud

Cloud-Eligible

Suitable for cloud only after major engineering work

Often, there are mainframe or on-prem hardware dependencies

May currently require technology that can’t be clustered and distributed

Cloud-Friendly

There are no major impediments to migrating the app to the public cloud

Some modifications need to be made, such as upgrades from SQL 2008 or Server 2003 dependencies

Cloud Ready

All application tiers are suitably distributed and available to public cloud

Cloud Native

Stateless elastic front end

Highly available back end

Ideally includes the ability to use PaaS services where valuable

Migration Process

We have a battle-tested process for migration, which involves four phases, each with distinct goals and deliverables. The below should be viewed as the ideal path with ample time to measure twice and cut once before moving, though we’ve encountered plenty of situations where we’re asked to ‘rebuild the plane’ while in flight. We understand that not every customer fits into the mold and that some circumstances require an expedited focus on one or more of the areas below.

1. Discovery WorkshopWorkshop Examining Your Business

People - How well suited are your existing staff for a technology pivot?

Policies - Will your or your customer's policies and regulatory requirements present any roadblocks to using the public cloud?

Process - What does public cloud or hybrid cloud mean for your existing IT processes?

Technology - What, if any, updates need to be made to your technology and workloads to make them cloud ready?

Migration Tools From Microsoft

Moving data and compute resources between environments can be a daunting task for enterprise organizations, but the team at Microsoft has developed Azure Migrate to ensure businesses feel more confident before, during, and after their migration phase. Beginning with a cloud assessment, Azure can analyze virtual machines and workloads with reports noting resource dependency, readiness status, and cost estimates.

Azure Database Migration Service

Migrating databases does not need to be a hassle, as Microsoft's Database Migration Service enables enterprises to migrate at scale from multiple data sources. Microsoft provides data migration services for SQL, MySQL, and PostgreSQL.

Azure Data Box

Don't have the option to transfer data over a network - or don't want to cripple your bandwidth? Microsoft offers Azure Data Box, an offline solution to move terabytes, or even petabytes, of data with up to AES 256-bit encryption.

Azure Site Recovery

Don't allow your business to go offline - learn to minimize downtime and recovery with Azure Site Recovery. With replication, failover sites, and recovery processes, Microsoft Azure keeps you up and running, all without the need to build or maintain a secondary datacenter.

Common Business Use Cases

Application Protection:

As organizations move outside their premise datacenters into Azure, they are ready to look at operational security beyond traditional next-generation firewalls. Organizations are looking for layers of attack and threat protection to help modernize their application stacks. Vandis engineers are experienced in deploying solutions to protect your web application workloads, both on-premise and in the cloud, and to provide best in breed front end security. Vandis’ DevOps team works to modernize applications and create a defense-in-depth strategy to shrink your organization’s attack landscape. To further improve security, our DevOps team can aid in application re-architecture that is optimized for cloud environments.

Application Modernization:

Organizations are being mandated to update their applications for cloud readiness. Once updated, your organization’s legacy applications will be modernized and optimized to both out-perform on-premise metrics while also being secure and cost-effective. Vandis’ DevOps team will work with you to assess:

Legacy Applications

Secrets Administrators

Data Protection

Automation

Continuous Integration & Delivery

Software Development Life Cycle

Highly Available Dynamic Applications:

The cost and time required to modernize and migrate each application to the cloud can be daunting to many organizations. Vandis can help build an architecture that leverages automation to dynamically shift your workloads between private cloud and Azure while maintaining application performance and availability. This solution will allow your organization to have a protected workload that is no longer bound by geography, bare metal capacity, or bandwidth.